We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
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What the hell is one supposed to make of this?
The point at which Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez decided that London should serve as a model for services and governance in Caracas was not immediately apparent. He came in May, visited City Hall amid much controversy and fanfare, and was soon gone.
But the result of his visit is likely to be an extraordinary deal struck with London Mayor Ken Livingstone that would see Caracas benefit from the capital’s expertise in policing, tourism, transport, housing and waste disposal.
London, meanwhile, would gain the most obvious asset the Venezuelans have to give: cheap oil. Possibly more than a million barrels of the stuff.
South American diesel would be supplied by Venezuela – the world’s fifth-largest oil exporter – as fuel for some of the capital’s 8,000 buses, particularly those services most utilized by the poor.
This is gesture politics at its most contemptible. It is particularly bad given that the poor of London are, by any meaningful yardstick, considerably better off than their counterparts in the South American nation. The idea that Venezuela, a nation led by a thug who’s democratic credentials could be best described as flaky, is some sort of benefactor to the oppressed masses of London, is an utter joke. It is also particularly ironic that as part of this “deal”, London will “help” Venezuela’s tourist industry. No doubt Venezuelans cannot wait to discover the joys of the British welcoming service ethic.
We tend to dismiss the antics of Ken Livingstone as political theatre. If he wants to stand on platforms with Irish Republican murderers, we giggle. If he provides platforms for gay-hating Islamic preachers, we are all supposed to roll our eyes in amusement. Good ol’ Ken, what a laugh.
Incidentally, I wonder what the British government thinks about this?
Canada has much stricter gun laws than in the United States, and so, one would assume, is a far safer place if one believes in the idea that the way to make society safer is to reduce access to items that can be used to kill. Well, generalisations are of course always dangerous, but I am not quite sure how this horrific story from Canada quite fits inside the gun-control argument. On the BBC television news this evening, the news announcer explicitly referred to the contrast between laws in Canada and the United States and expressed great puzzlement over the Canadian shootings.
UPDATE: here is another account of the story, with an update on the number of injured.
“It had always bothered him to see waste; to see Gas Giant atmospheres not mined for their wealth in hydrogen; to see energy from stars spill into the void, without a Dyson Sphere to catch and use it; to see iron and copper and silicates scattered in a hundred million pebbles and asteroids, instead of a smelter or nanoassembly vat.”
– The Golden Age, by John C. Wright, page 261.
The Times newspaper, owned by Rupert Murdoch, has yet to really come out strongly in favour of Tory leader David Cameron, preferring to stick, for the time being, with the Labour Party, or at least maintain a sort of studied neutrality. If you can recall that far back, Blair famously courted Murdoch’s media empire ahead of the 1997 election, convincing Murdoch that a Labour administration would not repeat the mistakes of the past. It worked, and the Times gave Blair and his court a remarkably easy ride for the first few years of Blair’s time in office.
Even so, with Labour in deep trouble, Blair and finance minister Gordon Brown at each others’ throats, the position of the Tories appears to be more promising than for a long time. You might think that Cameron, even though he has shown himself to be trend-follower since becoming leader, might take the odd risk by not trying to creep up to fashionable chattering-class opinion on such issues as Iraq, the Israeli-Hizbollah conflict and the ongoing campaign to crush Islamic fanaticism. Instead, as the Times notes today, what we get is a mixture of truths, half-truths and vacuous sound-bytes on foreign affairs.
Apologists for Cameron – some of whom pop up on the comment threads here – like to use the following, rather damning argument. It goes like this: the public will never vote for a small-government, strongly pro-capitalist, pro-America, pro-liberty Tory Party. The English middle class floating voters, so the argument goes, are not exactly the most intelligent demographic on the surface of the Earth, and are convinced that any tax cuts must come at the expense of the poor, the health service and education. Capitalism is cruel and rather naughty. Saving the planet and forcing people to give up their cars is a Jolly Good Idea (for other people). So Cameron, realising that this is what people think, has to appeal to this mindset. Once he is in power, suddenly, he can give up the “hug-a-mugger” rhetoric, tell the Greenies to go hang, slash taxes and regulations, restore in full the English Common Law, stop nagging us about eating chocolate oranges, etc.
Like many cynics, they are wrong. I would have thought that Cameron, if he has any sense at all, would realise by now that unless he lays down a few markers about what he would actually do in power, then he will face a situation where, once elected, it would be hard to push through a radically pro-market agenda particularly if the Tories get a narrow majority. “Where’s the mandate?”, people would cry. And their cries would have some merit. When Margaret Thatcher won power, the Tory manifesto of 1979 was famously thin. There was little mention of the kind of privatisation and large cuts to tax rates that were to follow. But even so, during the 1975-79 run-up to the elections, Mrs Thatcher, along with colleagues like Sir Keith Joseph, did voice a coherent, and sustained attack on things like Keynesian demand management, out-of-control trade unions, nationalised industries, regulations on business and controls on trade. In short, Mrs Thatcher made it pretty clear what sort of administration hers would be like. She gave herself a bit of room to say to the doubters during the hard years after 1979: “This is my platform and the public voted for it”.
Cameron, if he wants to con his way into power, is, I supposed, welcome to try. Britain’s political history is full of adventurers like Disraeli or chancers like Lloyd George. But when I hear libertarian-leaning Tory voters trying to convince me that Cameron is embarking on the mother-of-all deceptions, it sounds suspiciously close to whistling in the dark to sustain the spirits. I am not convinced.
This book states what the revisionists have questioned: the fall of the Roman Empire sucked and the Dark Ages really were dark and a regression for civilisation. Looks like a must-read for fans of ancient history.
The other day, my article about the antics of footballers and the shifting balance of power between players and clubs prompted one or two commenters to argue that this shows that market economics and sport do not always mix. The argument, so it goes, is that a sport like football or motor racing needs to operate an almost egalitarian policy when it comes to limiting the power of any participant, because otherwise the most powerful clubs and participants will dominate a sport so much that they destroy the very competition that makes sport enjoyable. Example: the current dominance in the English Premier League of Chelsea, which is now backed by the vast and dubiously-acquired oil wealth of its Russian owner. Another example: Ferrari and its dominance for nearly a decade of Formula One motor sport.
But while such observations have merit, it ignores the fact that sporting institutions like the Football League or Formula 1, the America’s Cup yachting race or whatever are voluntary associations of likeminded people who want to create a set of rules in order for people to have, well, fun. Those voluntary bodies can change their own rules if a participant’s behavioural dominance starts to squeeze the very competition such institutions hold. People effectively choose to submit to rules, just as members of a symphony orchestra voluntarily submit to the dictates of a conductor. In an open society such as ours, we get a profusion of autonomous institutions set up for the purpose of say, staging sports competitions where there are tight rules on behaviour of the participants but where such participants are free to leave.
I personally think that if, say, Chelsea tried to squash all competition beyond a certain point, it could drain interest out of the sport and possibly force the league officials to cap things like the use of foreign players and perhaps even limit the size of a squad that any club can have. And that would be “autocratic” of the league but also no assault on the “freedom” of Chelsea since that club draws is raison d’etre from being a club participating in an intensely rule-bound voluntary association.
Also, if a sport gets bent out of shape and the interest wanes, there are things like “breakaway leagues” or new competitions designed to revive interest. The case of motor sport is instructive: in the last few years, there has been a rising chorus of criticism that F1 motor racing is dull, unglamorous and market-driven (and although no-one will admit this, also very safe). So you get a rise in interest in alternatives, such as rallying, motorcycling, saloon car racing, classic racing, revival meetings, and so forth.
There seems to be a sort of parabola of development in sports. As technical excellence and physical fitness of players increases, some sports can reach a sort of stalemate end-point (Brian Micklethwait made this point about squash and the World Cup soccer tournament recently). But so long as sport remains outside the maw of the state and people can arrange their own events, there is no reason why people who become bored by the spectacle of spoiled-brat soccer stars or processional motor racing cannot do something about it.
Dutch-born writer Ian Buruma writes about the issues stemming from the murder of Dutch film-maker Theo Van Gogh. On the basis of his previous writings, I would have expected his account to be a compelling one. This reviewer of his book, however, gives a fairly harsh assessment. (Via Arts & Letters Daily).
Readers of Murder in Amsterdam are likely to close the book with a heavy heart. One reason is that the problem it addresses, the emergence of militant Islam as a divisive political/religious force in the West, is not going to go away soon. Another is that, though full of learning and skilled if tepid reporting, Buruma’s book often feels muddled, ungenerous and confusing. There is plenty of scholarship on display, but no compelling point of view.
There is, however, an off-putting strain of snobbery. Buruma, an Asia specialist and the author of Inventing Japan, Anglomania and, most recently, Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies, grew up in Holland but left it as a young man in the 1970s. Now a New Yorker, he clearly feels he’s gone on to bigger and better things. He rarely misses a chance to take a swipe at some aspect of Dutch life, whether it’s the “dank and gray” area of the Hague he was raised in or the “arrogance” of the great national soccer teams of the 1970s and ’80s.
Van Gogh’s murder followed the assassination two years earlier of Pim Fortuyn, Holland’s flamboyantly gay, and very popular, anti-immigration politician who had also railed against the Islamicization of the Netherlands. Fortuyn was killed not by a Muslim, but by a white, left-wing vegan “activist”, who didn’t like the fact that the flashy politician wore fur collars and criticized immigrants. “The sobering truth,” wrote Rod Dreher in National Review shortly after Fortuyn’s death, “is that Europe – democratic, gun-controlling Europe – is a place where questioning the immigration status quo will not only get you branded a fascist by the news media, it will get you shot dead.”
Read the whole article.
The Cato Institute’s invaluable index of liberty, compiled along with another free-market think tank, the Fraser Institute, says that liberty, as measured across a variety of fronts, is advancing. It uses a sort of numeric to calculate the overall impact of government rules, and puts Hong Kong at the top, with Ireland and Britain tied at sixth place:
Nations that have made substantial gains in economic freedom since 1985 are Hungary, Iceland, El Salvador, Zambia, Poland, Bolivia, Israel, Ghana, Uganda, Peru, and Nicaragua. Nations that have registered significant losses in economic freedom since 1985 are Myanmar, Venezuela, and Zimbabwe. The bottom ten nations were the Central African Republic, Rwanda, Burundi, Algeria, Guinea-Bissau, Venezuela, Democratic Republic of Congo, Republic of Congo, Myanmar, and Zimbabwe.
Of course, libertarians would argue that the right to dispose of one’s labour and property is indivisible from other non-economic liberties, which is why I tend to view such exercises as having indicative value only. A country like Singapore, for example, ranks high on the charts for entrepreneurship but operates an-often stifling regulatory regime on personal behaviours, while other countries may allow more freedom in things like drugs, porn or gambling but also have weightier taxes and regulations on activities such as saving and investment.
Even so, it is pretty clear, as the Cato press release states, that places that are economically free and open to entrepreneurial vigor tend to be richer, and also nicer, places to live, while those that seek to freeze the economic status quo are also not just poorer, but tend also to be less pleasant, less tolerant towards minorities, harsher towards women, and generally crappier in the quality-of-life stakes.
Benjamin Friedman, hardly a fire-breathing free marketeer, also points out that wealth begets niceness in his recent book.
If you love innovative photography, particularly of landscapes and modern, soaring buildings at day and night, go and have a look at this. Wow. (Hat-tip, Andrew Sullivan).
Even by the megalomaniac standards of modern Premiership soccer, this allegation, if true about former Chelsea player William Gallas, is astonishing:
Chelsea say they sold William Gallas because he threatened to score an own goal if he was selected for their first game of the season.
The Stamford Bridge club have released a statement explaining their reasons for allowing the French defender to join Arsenal on transfer deadline day.
Gallas, 29, allegedly refused to play again for the Blues.
Chelsea claim he said he would score an own goal if he was forced to play against Manchester City on 20 August.
This story has had the amazing effect of making me feel a tincture of sympathy for the charmless Chelsea football manager, Jose Mourinho.
The market for footballers and other sports remains a strange one. Footballers have, in the space of under 50 years, gone from the position of being treated almost like serfs with capped wages to swaggering characters thinking they are able to command whatever salaries they want, on any terms. But I suspect that this process is hitting the buffers. There has been a great boom in professional soccer and the surrounding business over the past two decades but one suspects that that has now reached a sort of plateau
Football has to compete with other forms of entertainment. The less-than-stellar performance of England in the World Cup, coupled with lingering sourness and the antics of certain players, may have sated the public appetite for shelling out vast sums for a season ticket to a game. And when a player becomes so deluded about his importance to a club that he actually threatens to damage it by scoring own goals and so on, then he has to be pushed out. Chelsea had no alternative. if this guy had been a bond dealer at a bank and had threatened to hurt the company if it failed to do what he wanted, that person would probably be sued to an inch of his life.
At least 14 people were arrested on Friday night in south London as part of an anti-terror operation by police. Developing…
I must admit my heart sank when I heard that a remake of the classic, and creepy UK film, The Wicker Man, was coming out. We seem to have a lot of remakes at the moment, prompting thoughts that Hollywood has run dry on creative ideas. I sympathise up to a point with this. The remake of the old Michael Caine/Noel Coward caper, the Italian Job, was an amusing piece of film but not a patch on the original. Flight of the Phoenix was good, but not as good as the original, etc. And yet and yet….the Thomas Crown Affair, starring Pierce Brosnan and Rene Russo and Denis Leary, was excellent, in fact an improvement in certain ways on the original, which starred the great Steve McQueen.
I suspect the problem is that when we first see a film, or read a novel, we intend to invest a certain amount emotionally in the experience if is a good one. I can imagine the howls of outrage if someone tries to remake Casablanca, or the African Queen, say. One of the problems of course is that remakes can remove elements deemed politically incorrect. The original Italian Job, for example, took a poke at the older incarnation of the EU, known at the time as the Common Market; it also made fun of Italian crooks and security services, while it also celebrated a sort of camp Britishness and had the wonderful character, Professer Peach, as played by Benny Hill (his character had a penchant for very large women).
Even so, I resist the urge if I can to get snooty about remakes. Peter Jackson, the maestro behind Lord of the Rings, is planning to bring out a new version of the classic war movie, The Dambusters, using modern computer technology to portray how 617 Squadron breached a number of German dams during the war. Jackson is no PC bore and seems determined to pay his respects to the heroisim of the RAF. I am definitely looking forward to the film when it comes out.
In the original movie, the RAF leader Guy Gibson has a black labrador, called Nigger. I will be interested to know if that rather un-PC fact is airbrushed out. Also, it being the 1940s, most of the aircrew should smoke cigarettes like chimneys. Will they be forced to stub out the habit to preserve the sensibilities of 21st Century viewers?
Well shall see.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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